Michael A. Freeman, Duke University
This paper demonstrates that copyists in the ancient Mediterranean were trained and worked as scribes from a significantly earlier age than previously understood. Scholars have noted that the writing exercises used to train the bookhands of apprentice copyists employ the same paradigms found in elementary school texts (Bellet; Cribiore, 1996, 2001; Fournet). My analysis of these exercises, informed by data from apprenticeship contracts and documents, indicates that training copyists practiced using elementary school texts because they were elementary school-aged children.
When learning to become a professional copyist, an apprentice would hone their script through writing exercises termed “scribal trials” (Cribiore, 1996; cf. Harrauer & Sijpesteijn). The most common texts copied in these trials were “school texts” (alphabets, pangrams, and incipits of famous passages) used to teach children to read and write in the elementary stages of education. This phenomenon has been explained by scholars as a scribe recalling, when tested on the spot, a line of text from their childhood education (Bellet; Fournet; Taylor). Such a narrative imagines the scribe executing these exercises as an adult craftsman recollecting lessons from years past. This was not the case. Evidence I have gathered from apprenticeship contracts (Bergamasco; Zambón), from documentary archives (Brand; Gardner et al., 1999, 2014), and from analogous scribal traditions (Amare; Contreni; Schroeder) indicates that most ancient copyists passed through this stage of scribal training as children. The scribes of these exercises used texts for school children as their models and mnemonics because they were school children who had been exposed to little beyond such texts.
Thirteen surviving apprenticeship contracts explicitly mention that apprentices are “not yet of age” (οὐδέπω ὄντα τῶν ἐτῶν), that they are “minors” (ἀφήλικα) or that they are “not yet in adulthood” (οὐδέπω ὄντα ἐν ἡλικίᾳ) (cf. Bergamasco). Even in the contracts where age is not specified, apprentices are evidently beneath the age of legal majority because they are never represented in the contracts as a legal person but are always represented by parents, guardians, or slaveholders (Bergamasco; Laes, 2008; Zambón). For children whose parents were scribes, or for slaves purchased for the purpose of scribal labor (Moss, 2021, 2023; e.g. Nepos, Atticus 13.3-4), professional training could begin and knowledge diffused within the household even earlier, from the most nascent stages of childhood (Bergamasco; Biscottini; Laes, 2008, 2015).
My findings have important implications for ancient reading and writing culture and its dark realities. We know that there was a market for child laborers in the households, workshops, and monasteries of antiquity (Kotsifou; Laes, 2008; Vuolanto). These institutions had incentive to conscript children as copyists from as young an age as possible: such work required a dexterity of body and a focus of vision that, over many years, took a toll on the writer; a child’s body could perform better and would last longer than that of an older scribe (Horsfall, 1995). My paper underscores how the mechanisms of scribal training fed this ever-present demand, transforming school texts into scribal trials and school children into scribal workers.